A single European country has allocated a total of resources to protect what is triple the sum of the amounts reserved by Brazilian congressmen for the national ministry of the environmental area through their parliamentary amendments in the last decade.
Since 2015, deputies and senators have separated the federal budget for the portfolio, while resources worth R$1.75 billion have come from the Amazon Fund, a program that aims to raise funds for prevention, monitoring, combating and sustainable use actions mainly in the Amazon forest.
During this period, the amount received by the fund was more than R$2 billion, that is, contributions from the Nordic country were responsible for 87.5% of the total in the last ten years.
The comparison of Sheet takes 2015 as its starting point because it was in that year that an amendment to the Federal Constitution forced the Brazilian Executive to pay for the individual amendments requested by congressmen and inaugurated a period of increasing control by the Legislature over the Budget, changing the way politics is done in the country.
Considering the entire existence of the Amazon Fund, in force since 2009, the collection was R$4.5 billion, of which R$1.8 billion has already been disbursed to support 119 sustainability projects in the states of the Legal Amazon, made up of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, Tocantins and part of Maranhão.
Norway accounts for 76.5% of these donations, followed by Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. Petrobras is the only national source of resources for the fund, having contributed R$17 million, or 0.4% of the total.
The Scandinavian country is the main foreign financier of nature protection actions in Brazil because, according to the Norwegian embassy, the country is committed to allocating 1% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to the international development agenda.
Contributions to the Amazon Fund are linked to the Norwegian International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), launched in 2007 as the main instrument of the European country’s climate policy.
In the Amazon region, due to COP30, a conference that puts Brazil in the global showcase and mobilizes the political class with speeches in defense of nature.
Taking as a basis only the parliamentary amendments reserved to the Brazilian ministry of the environment, for specific use in the states of the Legal Amazon, the disparity in comparison with foreign donations since 2015 increases.
The sum of the amendments for employment in this region was R$ 11.6 million — equivalent to 2.2% of the funds received by the environmental department, which in the current government (PT) is called the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MMA).
In the same period, deputies and senators allocated to the Amazon states a total of resources at least three times greater than those for environmental protection actions in the Amazon forest region.
Inspection agents, authorities, environmentalists and indigenous leaders heard by the Sheet associate the abundant distribution of equipment to city halls and other public bodies, combining developmental discourses with violations of the law.
For Alessandra Cardoso, political advisor at Inesc (Institute of Socioeconomic Studies), an entity that has analyzed the federal budget for more than two decades, it is necessary to consider that the allocation of funds by the Brazilian State to the area of the environment has always been low.
“The Environment budget in the last ten years is no more than R$3 billion to R$5 billion. It is a very small budget for a national policy that has gigantic challenges. We are talking not only about the Ministry of the Environment and the direct administration, but also about the [ (Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis ]from ICMBio [ Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade]the Forest Service and even the Botanical Garden [do Rio de Janeiro]”, he states.
According to Adriana Ramos, executive secretary of the Instituto Socioambiental, “historically, all Brazilian environmental policy has depended largely on international resources, since the creation of the first Secretariat for the Environment, which preceded the ministry, back in the 1970s”.
According to Ramos, the amounts from abroad were not only invested in actions at the federal level, but also financed, for example, the structuring of state environmental secretariats
The executive secretary of the MMA, Anna Flávia Franco, says that the ministry is working for Congress to increase the allocation of parliamentary amendments to the environmental area, but the responsibility for financing the protection of biomes in Brazilian territory must continue to be shared with other countries.
“We would like congressmen to have greater sensitivity to allocate a greater volume of resources to the Ministry of the Environment. Without replacing what international cooperation brings, Congress should really contribute, because fundamentally we have the Amazon biome in our territory”, says Franco.
To encourage the forwarding of parliamentary amendments, the MMA has just launched a booklet addressed to congressmen that indicates 42 projects capable of receiving amounts from deputies and senators.
It has an environmentalist front that is formally made up of 187 parliamentarians.
However, according to the front’s coordinator, federal deputy Nilto Tatto (PT-SP), only around 30 congressmen work directly on the environmental agenda.
“They are parliamentarians from different political parties, the vast majority of them from parties in the progressive camp. There is also a very strong alliance with parliamentarians from the animalist caucus, so we work together. That’s why you have more conservative parties on this list of deputies, which have hegemony from the ruralist caucus, for example”, he says.
“But when it comes to the most important votes, from the point of view of the environmental agenda, we have 120, 130 deputies, we can count that”, adds Tatto.
The deputy’s assessment finds support, for example, in the July vote on the bill that makes environmental legislation more flexible, the so-called Licensing PL, in which 116 congressmen decided against the approval of the legislative matter considered harmful to the protection of nature by the environmentalist front.
Wanted by Sheetthe office of the president of , Davi Alcolumbre (União Brasil-AP), sent a note in which he stated that “the allocation of foreign resources to environmental funds does not represent dependence, but rather solidarity cooperation, in accordance with the responsibility of developed countries to support developing nations in preserving biodiversity, combating deforestation, expanding renewable energy and responsible management of natural resources”.
According to the note, “the presidency of the Federal Senate and the National Congress does not make a value judgment on the allocative choices of parliamentarians.”
The report also sought the presidency of the House through its press office, which stated that the issue should be addressed by leaders of the House’s budget committees. The leaders were contacted, but did not speak out.
